Hyper Ultra Astronautics 0.1.1 beta released

I had decided not to add any new weapons during beta phase, but I did it anyway. Meet smartgun:

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It's a similar to the magnetic cannon, but with lower rate of fire and projectiles that steer away from friendly ships and towards enemies.

One problem with the mobile controller apps have been that they do not work in all Wi-Fi setups. Many (especially public) Wi-Fi networks seem to block UDP multicast which prevents the app from finding any games. I haven't been able to fix this so that it would work everywhere, so I've added manual connection as a backup. Now the game shows the listening IP address when a match starts. Updated mobile controller apps allows you to manually enter this address for cases where game listing does not show any games.

This update also adds a "Winnitron compatibility mode". This mode allows Hyper Ultra Astronautics to run in Winnitron arcade cabinets. I will later upload the game to Winnitron network.

Lockdown Protocol 1.4.3 Released

This is a maintenance update to Lockdown Protocol, the first one in 2.5 years! I didn't realize it's been that long.

The most important reason for this update was that the Linux version is no longer working out-of-the box in many of the modern distributions due to removal of required old libpng library version. Also, a lot of bug fixes and improvements have been made to my "engine code" over the years while developing Hyper Ultra Astronautics.

I decided to drop the built-in level sharing mechanism, because it was a maintenance nightmare and due to the fact that during last three years it has been used only three times in total.

I will no longer build a 32-bit Linux version, because practically no-one downloads that anymore.

The biggest feature still missing is the iOS version of the controller app. The app is made using Godot engine, so porting should not be an issue. The problem is that I don't have Apple developer license or any Apple hardware to build and test on. I have released the source code and I'm hoping that I can find someone else to publish it on iOS.

Here's a brand new trailer for Hyper Ultra Astronautics:

Click below to play the video. Note: This will load the embedded video from Youtube and will allow Google to collect data according to their privacy policy.

As for the pricing, I have finally made some decisions. The game will be available at "pay what you want" price on Itch.io with no minimum payment. I will possibly later add some additional weapons/items that are only available above certain price point, but the base game will remain freely available. If the game later on ends up in other stores (for example Steam), I will likely have to set a fixed price.

Preparing for GDPR

Because the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming into effect next month, I have been trying to make sure my website and game services are compliant. As neither the website nor the services require registration or login, there wasn't much personal data being collected to begin with. I have always been wary of storing any sensitive data so naturally my aim is to not collect any personal data that would require user consent according to GDPR.

Nearly all services running on the host log IP addresses and those will be considered personal data. I can't disable logging completely as that information is crucial for detecting and preventing network problems, hack attempts, service misuse, etc. Instead, I set up all logs containing IP addresses to be deleted after 12 weeks. Similarly, all IP addresses are purged from game service databases like high score tables. This limited IP address storage should fall within "legitimate interest".

The big problem was third party code running on the website. I was surprised by the amount of cookies set by embedded videos and widgets. Here's what I did to improve the situation:

Google Analytics was completely removed as I haven't been using it that much anyway. I might reconsider this later if I can find a way to do that without collecting any personal data and thus not having to ask for user consent.

ShareThis social media sharing widget was replaced by direct share links to social media sites.

According to multiple online cookie checkers, no tracking cookies are created. Playing embedded videos will still access external resources and potentially allow third party servers to store data provided by the browser. I don't know how I could prevent this unless I self-host everything.

Edit 2018-05-22: It turned out that no-cookie version of Youtube embeds may still track users even before playing the video, so I changed the code so that the actual Youtube embed is only loaded once user clicks on the preview image to play the video. This also made pages load a bit faster.